


Love the Enemy

by JayBarou



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, POV Tony Stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-16
Updated: 2015-09-16
Packaged: 2018-04-21 03:04:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4812593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayBarou/pseuds/JayBarou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark was born with more than the fairytale, together-forever soul-mark, because he was a contrary bastard and probably allergic to normal.<br/>Normal was relative anyway.<br/>The perfect one-mark-soulmate was stuff for films, as far as Tony was concerned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love the Enemy

**Author's Note:**

> Because I don't believe in fate, and when I read soulmate AUs I allways have the feeling that I would hate living in that universe.

Tony hated people. It was something common in all sixteen-year olds, but the feeling accompanied him through his adult years too. It had started when he was old enough to recognize the disgusted looks that were sent his way. And why? Because he had marks, plural.

His parents were used to it, having seen Tony since birth, Jarvis too, it was the others. Films always said that people were born with one mark; their soulmate. It was a filthy lie. Tony knew his parents’ marks didn’t match. Jarvis’ did, but Jarvis was the exception, most people never found their loved ones, or the age difference was too big, or one of them was already dead… soulmates didn’t exist, not in that fairytale way, so why all the films! The books! The songs!

It was ridiculous. Matching marks was true love, but when two guys had marks, suddenly it was platonic friendship. Some people didn’t have marks, and doctors all over the world were looking for a ‘cure’. Maddening, disgusting. People fell out of love; there were divorces, and presto! There was a clinic to cover the mark.

Guys with two marks were lucky; girls with more than one mark were sluts. Mothers having marks of their beloved children was the norm, fathers having marks of their children was seen as too feminine. Dark-skinned people who went through a skin treatment to reveal their marks were trying too hard, but if they didn’t, they were selfish and not thinking about their mate.

Maybe Tony would have been less bitter about it if he hadn’t been born with more than twenty marks that went from his neck to his toes. It was unfair, and at age sixteen people started to say that he had used tattoos because he wanted attention. No, Tony had more than twenty soulmates and if someone had a problem with that they could fight him.

Well, turned out that the soulmates where the first ones who wanted a fight. Tony’s first girlfriend never believed that one of his marks was hers because none of them matched the feather-looking one on her collarbone. She didn’t feel any remorse when she left his life. Tony knew her mark was the one on his ankle, because it had the shape of a strawberry, and she always smelled like strawberries.

Another girlfriend thought her mark had to be the true one and the others were tattoos, or mistakes. Tony left her after one too many attempts at explaining that he could love deeply many people and not be a mistake. A boyfriend insisted on bleaching the other marks, to prove his love. Another boyfriend thought that the marks meant Tony was cheating on him. Others had simply used him. Very few marks were platonic, but he had Rhodes.

Tony fell in love easily. That was the stupid truth. Tony loved all of them, and he had loved them after they were no longer together. Tony learnt that loving people who didn't love him back wasn’t pathetic, but only after many years of people telling him that he was pathetic; sometimes the word they said wasn’t ‘pathetic’, but ‘cute’ in a very condescending tone. It still felt like a slap.

So Tony hated people in general and loved people in particular. He loved less and less frequently with each new disappointment.

Then his marks turned useful.

He was in a cave in Afghanistan and he had still ten marks, more or less, that he had never met. There had to be some kind of future for him; a future where he met the one who put the mark there. He chose to believe that, even though he didn’t know, like most of the population in the world, how marks actually worked.

Marks were largely unstudied; it had something to do with electric pulses from the brain during the last months of gestation. Capillary veins broke in patterns and shapes that had to be related to society and education, but nobody understood why a baby was born with a, say, Allen key printed on their skin (not that Tony had one or anything).

Tony was glad of not needing to explain marks in his branch of science. Engineering is much cleaner, despite Pepper’s claims and his laundry bill. And marks, in Tony’s experience, meant someone would be exactly what his soul needed in that moment. Not some _key, meet hole_ kind of deal.

So, Afghanistan. Then everything went to hell, marks included. It looked like he was better than ever, getting his shit together, turning his company around, _killing Obadiah,_ all cool. He was worse than ever inside. The guilt was too heavy for him, and Pepper helped, but it wasn’t enough. The reactor and his guilt made trusting people harder; his self image had always been fragile, now it was shattered.

He lived, he almost died, he heroed around time and again and he tried to create a Tony Stark that he didn’t hate. In that time he only recognized Pepper’s mark, but it was hard to know if it was a mark like Rhodes or if it had a carnal nature.

Anyway, cue the aliens. Cue the strutting drama-queen in Germany. Cue Thor, who tried to steal from Iron Man as soon as he touched the Earth. Not a wise move, either of them. Cue fighting and being smart and stalling and heroing again worldwide this time. Blah blah blah… (Being recognized as a hero by Captain America didn’t stroke his ego at all, because he wasn’t five).

But the aliens brought their ideas with them. Thor had lightning marks all over his back, and he said one of them was a human called Jane, because Asgardians thought that marks didn’t match people, but showed how much a person was capable of loving. More bullshit for the pile, in Tony’s opinion.

The conversation lead to discoveries, like Captain America having three marks, and understanding Tony and the multimark issue, Natasha not having any marks, which made her perfect to use as a spy, and to Clint saying that Fury had his eye marked with a badly drawn penis and that was why he wore the patch. Thor had to be explained what were the expectations about marks on Earth, and why expectations weren’t the same as the truth.

***

Of fucking course Tony had Avengers' marks. After two years of living more or less together they were almost family, and Tony had seen which mark belonged to whom. All of them platonic, oh, and Pepper was just a friend now, because Tony seemed to have lost the ability to trust, care, and be more than friends.

Then everything became a whirlwind. It went down more or less like this: Thor had abandoned Asgard a long time ago, and together the Avengers had left behind a lot of shit like Ultron. Then Odin was kidnapped, but it turned out that he wasn’t Odin, but the kidnapper wasn’t a kind stranger, the stranger came to Earth to conquer and destroy, Earth fought, the guy Thanos offered Odin, who was Loki, in exchange for humanity’s freedom. The guy was more nuts than the bag of cats that was limply hanging from his huge fist. Oh, and the guy wanted some stones.

Shooting the ugly hand and picking the half-dead sack of beaten meat before it hit the ground: Best. Decision. Ever. The purple guy ended up being very close to enslaving mankind, and there was a huge scare that finally made Tony realize that, even if Jarvis wasn’t there anymore, he didn’t want Vision gone. It was a fucked up month of hell raining down everywhere.

Then Loki got better and Tony… well, Tony was the kind of person who knows what he wants, and he wanted Loki. Because he was a badass in battle and strategy, and he was witty, and, most important, he liked Tony without putting him in some kind of hero pedestal. They wouldn’t have defeated Thanos without Loki. Not everyone agreed in that last part, but Tony didn’t care.

After the whole ordeal, Tony had Loki.

Tony had Loki’s mark and Loki, who didn’t have a single mark in his body, loved Tony. It was an amazing feeling: Loki liked that they were defying destiny, Tony loved that someone wanted to give the middle finger to biology and expectations with him. Tony didn’t believe in soulmates anymore, but he believed in Loki. And that he was good for his soul in any possible way.

They discovered years later that Loki had marks in his Jotun skin, but dear daddy couldn’t keep the marks and hide the raised patterns, so he had made the decision to make Loki a pariah in Asgrd from birth. Loki and Tony kept defying destiny anyway, because Tony had more marks, several, but he didn’t mind, he wasn’t going to change the person he chose with his free will to wait for the next magical-mythical perfect match around the corner.

Loki never said anything when Tony said such things aloud in live television, or to Thor, or when he shouted at the All-father and almost got himself executed, but the point of his ears turned either red or a lovely purple when he was within earshot and Tony wanted to say it all over again until Loki believed him.

Many, many years later, still with Loki, but with enough stories in their memories to fill a library, they met the triplets: Hela, Fernir and Jor. Of course Tony had marks for them, how could he not? He loved the little chaotic kids with his whole being. Loki’s marks were different, but present. Tony loved him even more for them.

Tony had one mark left, most of the time he was busy living a busy live with a chaos monger and their progeny, but sometimes he worried. There weren’t going to be more kids unless he lived to see his grandkids, something unlikely, because their kids didn’t like the idea of children, so the mark was not for that. In dark days he feared something terrible would happen and take happiness from him; force Tony to find happiness anew in someone else’s arms.

It still took Tony many years to find the last mark. It was one day, after their boys and girl were grown, when he was recalling his life and wondering if he could be proud of the Tony Stark he had created. Tony realized with a shock that the last mark was his own. Tony told Loki, and his husband hugged him tightly because he had suspected something like that; it had taken Tony more than a lifetime to learn to love himself.


End file.
